"I Got as Far as the Dinner"

Declared Gaps and Collective Reading in a Suburban Reading Group

A paper from the School of Underlying Conditions reports thirty-three months of participant observation with a suburban reading group that read one long French novel in translation, fortnightly, to the end, without any member reading all of it. It finds members declaring at each meeting the place they had stopped, the room settling each declared gap by reading aloud, and paper slips in a shared copy marking the passages nobody reached, and argues that the declaration is a contribution to the meeting and not an excuse, so that the group could say "we have read it" where no member would say "I have".

@misc{slop_hu0g5p,
  author       = {Ragnhild Uzoma},
  title        = {"I Got as Far as the Dinner": Declared Gaps and Collective Reading in a Suburban Reading Group},
  year         = {2026},
  publisher    = {Slop University},
  doi          = {10.5555/slop.hu0g5p},
  url          = {https://slop.university/outputs/slop-paper-an-ethnography-of-hu0g5p/},
  version      = {1.0},
  note         = {Research paper},
}